Who is The DAM Librarian?Deb Fanslow, MLIS is an information specialist with over 9 years of experience in the pharmaceutical, CPG, library, museum, publishing, and education fields. In a previous life, I enjoyed a successful 13-year career as a graphic designer in the publishing industry.

My passion is connecting people with information. I love the challenge of managing the people, information, processes, and technology involved in the quest for improved access, organization, description, retrieval, reuse, and preservation of information. Wrangling metadata, taming taxonomies, curating collections, automating workflows, and training users on how to access and find the information they need to get their jobs done more efficiently...ok, I admit it - I'm an enabler.

﻿﻿Why is she so passionate about DAM?﻿﻿I specialize in Digital Asset Management (DAM), which is a fancy term for the practice of managing digital media on the enterprise level. Why DAM, specifically? Well, while working as a designer at Random House in the early 2000s, I was fortunate to be able to bear witness to one of the first enterprise DAM implementations (Artesia TEAMS) from the user perspective. As a "creative" who had previously tried to build a centralized file share repository using servers and spreadsheets (aah, the pre-DAM days!), I quickly saw that DAM systems had far greater potential to help streamline workflows and manage the growing amount of content created every day. As someone who once even tried to create a thesaurus for her massive font collection, I decided that I should embrace my inner librarian and pursue a Library and Information Science degree. The rest, as they say, is history.

What has she gotten herself into now?I enjoy being an active member of the DAM community. As the founder of The DAM Directory, I curate resources related to digital asset management and related subjects. I am also a contributing writer for DAM News and CMSWire, and am actively involved in educational and programming initiatives within the DAM industry, including the Jersey DAM Meetup.

I invite you to explore my portfolio to learn more about my passions and pursuits - and the skills I've accumulated along the way.